Hey everyone.
As most of you have probably noticed, as of about a week ago a news bot was added to this community and started posting articles from certain blogs/news sources every hour or so. This bot was not added by me, and as there are limited mod controls in Lemmy right now, I’m unable to limit the addition of bots to just mods (or at least require mod approval). I wanted to gauge this community’s sentiments about having that bot remain a part of this community?
Separately, I wanted to see if anyone else is interested in modding? To be honest, I was not the user that started this community, but asked to be made a mod once I noticed the original mod was no longer active. I won’t have the time to remain an active mod here as the community grows, so if there are folks who would be interested in taking on that role, please leave a comment below expressing your interest and leave a brief note as to why you’re interested.
Thanks everyone!
IMO that bot in it’s current form is very, very spammy given the current activity level of the community and should be nixed. It would be much more useful if it limited posts to 1-2 links a day from InsideEVs/Electrek/etc just to keep content fresh, without drowning the community in content that isn’t getting engagement.
I can toss my hat in to help moderate. For background, I’ve moderated an okay-sized subreddit (~30 posts/day, ~900 comments/day) and run a small regional instance for Lemmy so I have to pay some attention to what’s happening on Lemmy anyways.
Does Lemmy have a concept of a moderator queue? It could strike a happy balance between the bot overwhelming the community and having a diversity of content.
Unfortunately not. It only has a list of reports submitted by people.
Just made you a mod. Thanks for offering!
I generally do not like any of these reposting bots. If I wanted to browse electrek I would add it to my RSS feed. The advantage of a community like Lemmy is that we can have human-curated content - that someone finds something interesting online and posts it here for everyone else to review and comment on.
Just like I don’t want a bot that pulls every post from r/ElectricVehicles and posts it here I don’t want a bot that mindlessly pulls from any news source.
Hi guys, I’m the creator of the bot! My intention was only to have it add posts that are relevant to EV news, to spur discussions in the community, but I apologize if it came off spammy! I’m happy to modify the frequency it posts to something more like 1-2 links a day.
Yes please, just look how much the bot posted just now, its taken over my entire New feed.
Will do!
I think the intent is good, but you definitely want to keep an eye on how often it posts if it works in other communities too.
The last effect you want is for a community to have so many bot posts it looks like no human is participating in the comment sections. This may cause folks browsing communities to assume the entire community is strictly bot posting only and would lose interest.
I’ll just throw in my two cents and say, to a degree… I like the bot.
It provides us a diversity of topics that otherwise wouldn’t come to surface.
The problem is that the bot isn’t curated. Amongst the gold is a lot of fluff and repetitive content.
